Claude Lanzmann, film director, chronicler of the Holocaust, dies at 92

By Lori Hinnant

Published
2:33 pm PDT, Thursday, July 5, 2018

Film critic Roger Ebert called “Shoah’ “one of the noblest films ever made” and Time Out and the Guardian newspaper were among those ranking it as the greatest documentary of all time.

Film critic Roger Ebert called “Shoah’ “one of the noblest films ever made” and Time Out and the Guardian newspaper were among those ranking it as the greatest documentary of all time.

Photo: Todd Heisler / New York Times

Photo: Todd Heisler / New York Times

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Film critic Roger Ebert called “Shoah’ “one of the noblest films ever made” and Time Out and the Guardian newspaper were among those ranking it as the greatest documentary of all time.

Film critic Roger Ebert called “Shoah’ “one of the noblest films ever made” and Time Out and the Guardian newspaper were among those ranking it as the greatest documentary of all time.

Photo: Todd Heisler / New York Times

Claude Lanzmann, film director, chronicler of the Holocaust, dies at 92

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PARIS — French director Claude Lanzmann, whose 9½-hour masterpiece “Shoah” bore unflinching witness to the Holocaust through the testimonies of Jewish victims, German executioners and Polish bystanders, has died at the age of 92.

Gallimard, the publishing house for Lanzmann’s autobiography, said he died Thursday morning in Paris. It gave no further details.

The power of “Shoah,” filmed in the 1970s during Lanzmann’s trips to the barren Polish landscapes where the slaughter of Jews was planned and executed, was in viewing the Holocaust as an event in the present, rather than as history. It contained no archival footage, no musical score — just the landscape, trains and recounted memories.

Lanzmann was 59 when the movie, his second, came out in 1985. It defined the Holocaust for those who saw it, and defined him as a filmmaker.

“I knew that the subject of the film would be death itself. Death rather than survival,” Lanzmann wrote in the autobiography. “For 12 years I tried to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Shoah.”

“Claude Lanzmann’s cinematic work left an indelible mark on the collective memory, and shaped the consciousness of the Holocaust of viewers around the world, in these and other generations,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

“Shoah” was nearly universally praised. Roger Ebert called it “one of the noblest films ever made” and Time Out and The Guardian were among those ranking it the greatest documentary of all time. The Polish government was a notable dissenter, which dismissed the film as “anti-Polish propaganda” (but later allowed “Shoah” to be aired in Poland).

His final work, a series of interviews with four Holocaust survivors stitched together into a single 4½-hour film, was released in French theaters Wednesday.

Lanzmann was born Nov. 27, 1925, in Paris, the child of French Jews. After his mother left in 1934 and the war broke out, Claude and his two siblings moved to a farm where their father timed his children as they practiced escaping to a shelter he had dug.

Lanzmann ultimately joined the Resistance as a Communist and became intellectually enamored with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose “Anti-Semite and Jew” formed the philosophical underpinning of what would later be his life’s work.

Lanzmann joined Sartre’s circle and ended up having an affair with Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s companion who was 17 years older than the young acolyte.

Lanzmann tinkered in politics and journalism, working periodically for the journal France Dimanche, taking on freelance assignments. He joined Sartre in signing the Manifesto for the 121, calling on French soldiers to refuse fighting in Algeria, and was prosecuted.

Beauvoir, writing about Lanzmann in her memoir “Force of Circumstance” described him as someone who “seemed to be carrying the weight of a whole ancestral experience on his shoulders.”